


Gordian

by thatbroadcast



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Denial, First Time, M/M, Stupidity, Unresolved Sexual Tension, assholes in love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:20:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbroadcast/pseuds/thatbroadcast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Hermann is a nevernude divorcée, Newt pushes some buttons, and both of them are total assholes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The world has been ending for six years, eight months, and fourteen days. Hong Kong is lousy with heat, the Shatterdome itself a hotbox of sticky air and ill-tempered personnel. The next Breach isn't due for another eighty-four point five days, according to Hermann, and the wait is already interminable. Newt's beginning to seriously consider dunking himself in the ocean, except he'd probably mutate and grow a dorsal fin or something. Scientifically awesome, sure, but also a total cock-block.

Newt gave up on propriety somewhere around the middle of the week. He's slumped against a specimen tank in the coolest corner of the lab, palms flat to the metal flooring and shirt undone to the waist. Behind him, the Kaiju cerebrum presses its olfactory nerve against its glass casing with soft fleshy thumps. He's nearly lulled himself to sleep, imagining himself suspended in cool nutritious fluid right alongside it, when the door to the lab swings open and Hermann steps inside. 

Hermann, who can step so lightly even with the gimp leg that he sometimes sneaks up on Newt just for the sheer pleasure of scaring the piss out of him. Hermann, with his ferrety little face and lopsided mouth. Hermann, who has the douchiest accent this side of anywhere, and the most brilliant approach to statistical mathematics that Newt has ever seen, and who hates to be called by his given name so much that he flushes dully pink every time someone says it out loud. Hermann, whose divorce went through three months ago today. Fuck.

If Newt had been the one thrown over for some guy with a motorcycle fetish and an 8-digit bank account, he doesn't think he'd be as calm as Hermann has been. Too calm, really. Practically insensate. He's started going to bed at decent hours, eating right, cultivating sad little lines around his eyes. The worst part is that he's stopped yelling with, at, to Newt.

At first, Newt put it all down to post-divorce depression. That's normal, right? Hermann was supposed to be quieter than usual.

Then, two months in, Newt had accidentally-maybe-purposefully dipped Hermann's favorite blazer into a steel vat of liquefying Kaiju carcasses (boiling off the flesh to get at the bones, because it wasn't like laboratory safety procedures were something anyone actually cared about anymore) and Hermann had actually fucking apologized for leaving his jacket on Newt's side of the lab. Once Newt had finished shitting himself in pre-emptive terror, he'd realized this was probably a sign that something was really wrong.

He misses the shouting and the harsh Germanic syllables, misses the hobbled circular pacing. He even misses the inevitable screaming-induced rageboners that at the time had just been an embarrassing fact of life but now are maybe something he and Hermann can take care of together, except Hermann isn't Hermann anymore and it's all fucked up.

Newt doesn't want some soft and sad proto-Hermann, he wants to poke and prod until Hermann is spluttering and then choke him with his dick. Newt has never claimed to be a good person. But it's cool, because Hermann really isn't a good person, either. Newt just needs him to remember that.

Hermann is apparently tired of being ignored. He's making prissy little throat-clearing noises and prodding Newt's foot with his cane.

Newt cracks one eye open and frowns. "What's up?"

Hermann has been forgoing his usual suit jacket and sweater vest combo-of-nastiness since mid-June, his one concession to the shitshow weather. He keeps his shirts buttoned at the neck and the wrist, as wrinkled and eye-searingly patterned as usual, and Newt assumes that it is only by the grace of God that the man hasn't died of heat stroke yet. Today he has a thin sheen of sweat sitting high on his cheekbones, his hair hanging in limp clumps against his forehead. He is staring fixedly at some point directly above Newt's head.

"Doctor Geiszler, while I realize that you may have a near-pathological disregard for standard lab safety procedures, this is truly the upper limit. I insist you put your clothes back on at once, or else return to your own quarters and leave me in peace." It's very obvious which option Hermann is hoping for. He doesn't even sound angry, is the thing. Just defeated.

"Um," says Newt. "Let me see... nope. Yeah, no to all of that."

Newt watches with extreme interest as Hermann puffs all up like an agitated cat, hand going white-knuckled around the handle of his cane. He thinks with a touch of pride that no one can ever rile Hermann up like Newt can. It's basically a gift. Newt is a treasure.

"I mean, are you really so cruel that you'd send your one and only lab-mate to suffocate to death in his own quarters? I don't know about you, dude, but I think they lied when they said they fixed the AC last month."

"Don't 'dude' me." Hermann is still glaring at some point above Newt's forehead. Maybe the brain is waving hello at him. Newt loves when it does that.

"Well don't infringe on my personal rights! Ha. This is my half of the lab, Hermann, and if I want to cuddle up to the only thing that's colder than your frigid ass, I will." That was snappy. Newt's kind of proud of himself.

Hermann splutters and finally tears himself away from the specimen jar behind Newt. His eyes narrow. He looks even angrier than he had two weeks ago, when Newt had erased all of his newest equations and drawn anatomically correct Kaiju dicks instead. His color is high and the hand not clutching his cane is twitching uselessly at his skinny hip.

The thing is, in the four years they've worked together, Newt has never truly seen Hermann lose it. Oh, he's shouted, he's thrown shit (generally bits of chalk or ineffectual paper but once, memorably, his own shoe), he'd played his disgusting operettas until Newt thought his ears might be leaking blood. He's said the vilest, meanest shit that Newt has ever heard outside of prison dramas on HBO, but he's never lost it, not in the way Newt longs so much to see and that he thinks Hermann really needs right now. He's been talking himself back down too easily lately. Newt's actually begun to feel like a bully with all his constant poking and prodding, his casual nastiness.

He wants red-faced spluttering, obscenities, Hermann's ugly little face all screwed up with loathing. He wants to tip the scales from shouting-pissy-schoolboy to cold-rage-gonna-fuck-something-up. He wants the fight, and Hermann clearly needs it. This might be it. God, he should have known that all it would really take was a little skin to turn the guy's brain inside out. Fucking finally.

Slowly, with a frown, Hermann lifts his cane up and then puts it firmly down, directly onto Newt's bare left foot.

Newt shrieks, and Hermann's face goes momentarily smug with pleasure. "Seriously? Seriously? That's it?"

He's shoving himself to his feet, already scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt, pulling it closed. He's shaking, fingers clumsy.

Hermann is working his way past smug and straight into horrified, face twisted, looking anywhere but at Newt. He's actually fucking apologizing. Jesus christ, this is so fucked up. "Newton, I, I am so sorry, that was terribly unkind and utterly -"

Newt gets the last button before his collar done up, and lunges. He gets Hermann by the neck, fisting the material of his shirt in one hand, and pushes.

Hermann's cane clatters on the floor as they take awkward steps backwards: past the dividing tape that denotes His and His, past Hermann's shiny metal desk, past the neatly-kept bookshelves. Hermann stumbles but Newt grips his shirt even tighter, forcing him upright.

Then he has Hermann exactly where he wants him, shoulders pressed tight to his own chalkboard (and god, Newt hopes he's smudging something important right now). His hands are clutching at Newt's elbows, mouth open and spilling desperate platitudes, like Newt actually gives a shit. "You seriously just caned me in the foot? Did that really just fucking happen? And then you apologized? What the fuck is wrong with you, dude."

Hermann is clearly confused, beginning to push back, though not nearly fast enough. Newt can't help himself. He rocks up on his toes and shoves his face right up next to Hermann's, hissing, "Did Vanessa get your balls in the divorce, too?"

Newt suddenly finds himself on the ground, air knocked straight out of his lungs. Hermann limps away and picks up his cane, and his hands look like they're trembling. Newt has honestly never seen him look so shaken, and so he doesn't say anything, even when Hermann points the cane right at him and gives it a funny little shake of emphasis.

"You. You -" Hermann is pale, despite the heat, eyes wild. He gives a wordless snarl and says something very, very rude in German. Newt's German is so rusty it's nearly non-existant, but he can absolutely tell how rude it is, if the consonants-to-vowels ratio is anything to go by.

Newt arranges himself artfully on the floor, propped on one arm and hips seductively tilted. He bats his eyelashes and presses a hand to his own thigh. "Are you really so desperate for it that you can't even handle a little skin? Is that what this is really about? All you ever had to do was ask, Doctor."

The thing is, Newt probably would have stopped at this point if it was anyone else. Then again, the thought never would have crossed his mind if it was anyone else. But this is fun, this is them, this is Hermann giving his cane another sharp jab in Newt's direction and stalking away muttering under his breath. The door slams shut on the giggles that've been bubbling up from his punched lungs. Awesome.

 

 

"Holy shit. Holy shit." Tendo slaps his hand of cards face-down on the felted table. Nita scowls at him, having just plucked the river from the table. Tendo makes a face right back at her until she sets the card back on top of the deck. "Sorry, but are you hearing this?"

"I don't see what the big deal is." Newt grumbles and sets his own cards down, because even with the river there's no way his shitty hand is going to win the pot. A shame, because it currently holds six ounces of unground coffee, one pair of pliers, and a laundry pen. It's the little pleasures, you know? Sometimes Marshall Pentecost brings along the really good chocolate, that 60% cacao stuff that might as well be illegal, it's so difficult to find these days. Newt's heard rumors of violent engineering bidding wars over instant hot chocolate mix. Sometimes he has daydreams of dark chocolate coated espresso beans.

"You are such a fuckwit sometimes, little legs." Sarge says. She puts her hand down and takes a large gulp of the 40 ounce they've been passing around the table during each hand.

Newt just giggles at her until she shows him her middle finger, as thick and meaty as the rest of her. He makes grabby hands at her until she grudgingly passes him the beer. "But I'm right, aren't I? Hermann's just, like, traumatized right now. It's like he's forgotten how much he loves misery. You know?"

"Jesus christ," says Nita, and takes the beer away from him. 

Tendo flaps a hand, desultory. His bowtie is lying in a sad little puddle to the left of one elbow, because despite the heat, he just keeps on trying to wear it. "No, no, this is a good thing. Newt's just restoring the equilibrium a little bit. You know. Showing Gottlieb it's all right to get over everything and move on with his life."

"Do you even hear the things you say?" Sarge presses the back of one hand to her bald head with feigned shock. "Gottlieb is going to rip Newt's balls off and feed them to a Kaiju. Stop giggling, you little asshole. I will never fucking understand gay men."

"I'm not-"

Tendo fixes Newt with a capital-letter balls-to-the-wall Look. "I don't know what kind of childhood you had, my man, but no straight dude takes off his shirt and then slams another straight dude against a chalkboard."

"Why do you have to put it that way? I had my shirt on! It wasn't like that at all." Newt knows he's whining but can't seem to stop himself. All three of them are smirking at him and Sarge is rhythmically thrusting her index finger through a circle made with her opposite hand. "Well. It was maybe a little like that. Okay. It was totally like that."

Nita laughs so hard that her knees hit the underside of the table and the cards scatter everywhere. Everyone is too busy scrambling to pick all of them up to really care that Newt throws his own hand onto the middle of the table and walks out of the room. And it is a walk, not a run. Absolutely.

It's not like Newt's any good at gambling anyway. His poker face always leaves something to be desired.

 

 

He finds Hermann in the mess, gloomily dipping a tea bag in and out of a steaming mug. He's got three servings of creamer and half a peanut butter sandwich, too, which is how Newt knows it's dire. If there's one thing Hermann hates (even more than punk rock, Kaiju, and Newt himself), it's peanut butter.

Newt hangs back at the doorway and observes as he peels the tops off the creamers one by one and pours them in, watching the milk bloom. Hermann looks about as depressed as is usual lately, maybe even more so for drinking hot tea on the warmest day of the year. His mouth is tipped to the side in a frown, bottom lip pulled up beneath his teeth.

He doesn't look up when Newt sits opposite him, so Newt steals the rest of the sandwich and stuffs it all in his mouth in one go.

"So it's been brought to my attention that I may have gone about this all wrong." Newt says around the sandwich. It's stale-ish and sticky, full of crunchy peanut butter. Newt feels like a dog licking at the roof of it's mouth, wishing he had a glass of water.

Hermann doesn't so much as look at him, just dunks the teabag one more time before letting it drop, string and all, to the bottom of his cup. Newt doesn't really know what he was expecting (hoping for), maybe a stony glare or some incomprehensible shouting. Hermann has this amazing ability to make Newt feel two feet tall, like he's nothing, like he's a tenth of a number past a decimal point at the end of one of Hermann's equations.

Newt soldiers on, tact forgotten. "It's just, you've been kind of a mess lately? You haven't been acting like yourself at all, dude, and it's super weird, all right. You're like a shell of a guy right now. I don't know how to help you get over this."

Hermann's lip curls a little, slightly vicious, but he still doesn't look up.

"I was just trying to push you enough so that you'll stop acting like such a pussy!"

Hermann's stare is sudden and mortifying. His eyes are narrowed into little slits and Newt blames the beer for the way he has to cross his legs beneath the table and quash down that surge, the one that turns Hermann's ugliest glances into the stupidest kind of adoration swelling beneath Newt's breastbone. It's just that Newt wants so many things, and now that Hermann's a free man, he wants them all the time, so much that he aches with it sometimes.

"What in the world," Hermann begins slowly, taking a sip of his tea, "Made you think I would ever need your help, Newton?"

The thing is, Newt has no answer for that. He's so used to pushing and pulling with Hermann, arguing until they're both blue in the face and Newt is so pissed he can't even see straight, that it scares the shit out of him to think that maybe Hermann never wanted or needed any of that. Maybe Hermann's been on the rocks with Vanessa longer than he let on. Maybe he just took his frustration out on the nearest immovable object, maybe Hermann doesn't actually take pride in being the nastiest asshole in the K-Science division, maybe Newt's been wrong this entire time.

Is this Hermann, then? This hunched man sitting across from Newt with the downturned mouth and the quiet, sad eyes.

"I just kind of miss you." Newt finally admits, ashamed of how thready his voice has become. He laughs a little, shifting in his seat. "I mean, not you you, but work-you. Work-you who yells and throws shit and is like, the biggest pain in my ass ever."

Hermann has opened his mouth to say something, but he ducks his head and takes a sip of tea instead. "Stop it, Newton."

"And I was just thinking, maybe one of these days we could like. Go out for dinner or something? I know it's kinda out of the blue for you, but I've been meaning to ask ever since, you know. The whole divorce thing happened. And obviously by out for dinner I mean we should make out on your desk sometime, if you want. I know mine is kind of messy."

"Stop it, Newton." Hermann has gone absolutely pale. He still won't look Newt in the eye and his hand shakes, slopping milky tea all over his own knuckles.

Newt focuses in on the most inconsequential thing, of course. He knows he does. He knows he's being a total asshole. "It's Newt."

"Will you -! Shit. Bloody fucking hell. Stop it, Newt." 

In six years, Newt has never actually heard Hermann swear, and it throws him for such a loop that he does stop. His mouth stops running and his pulse thumps to a stand-still and he can barely even breathe anymore, this is all too amazing. He can't say a word and he is wonderfully, painfully hard, dick trapped and straining up against his zipper. He shifts his hips just once and sucks air into his lungs. He means to say something, anything, but he just can't. All that comes out is a stutter of empty noises. "Ah. I. Um?"

Hermann pushes himself to his feet, grabs his cane, and walks away. The line of his shoulders is sloping defeat. Newt's dick throbs. This is not Newt's beautiful Shatterdome, this is not Newt's beautiful lab partner.

"I'm not joking, you prick!" He manages, eventually. "Hermann! I'm serious! Fuck."

Hermann gives him the finger and lopes as fast as he can around the corner.

Newt drinks the rest of Hermann's nasty-ass tea out of spite, and then spends the next five minutes chugging water at the canteen to rinse the bitterness from his mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hermann is a hard man to pin down, Newt gets some, and Tendo is a terrible friend.
> 
> un-beta'd as usual. sorry, guys.

Hermann avoids him for the next four days. It's impressive, really. At the end of the day, the Shatterdome is only one square mile - not a whole lot of ground to disappear in when you've only got one mess hall, and your quarters are directly opposite those of the person you're avoiding. Newt has absolutely not been peering obsessively through his peephole at night.

By the second day, Newt begins to suspect that Hermann has been working exclusively at night. At first glance, nothing has changed. But look a little closer and there's a used teacup here, a book or two misplaced there. Also, new equations have appeared on at least one chalkboard, and someone has smashed Newt's favorite bongo drum to pieces and dumped the remnants in Newt's top desk drawer. Property damage is unlike Hermann, but Newt supposes it wasn't entirely uncalled for. He mourns the bongo, and then he moves on.

He knows it was kind of a dick move, saying shit like that to Hermann without at least feeling out the situation first. But the thing is, Newt knows he's right. He got a little over-excited, sure, and probably scared Hermann shitless, but he wasn't wrong.

Call Newt socially inept, call him that guy everyone else is vaguely ashamed to introduce to their other friends, but if there's one person Newt's always been able to understand, it's Hermann Gottlieb. His moods, his variations. His never-ending collection of ill-fitting sweaters. The way he sometimes looks at Newt, when he thinks Newt isn't paying attention. And besides, beyond all that, Hermann is a straight-up _champion_ when it comes to telling Newt no.

No coffee after two in the afternoon. Never even think about mentioning the moon landing hoax ever again. No Nirvana on Newt's speakers until at least five. Wear a face mask when you're dissecting that foul thing, for god's sake, Newton, what is wrong with you. Stop trying to speak German, I think blood might very well be leaking out of my ears by now. Stop changing my screensaver to pictures of puppies in baskets. I hate having feelings about cute things. (Newt made that last one up, but it's probably true, anyway.)

Hermann didn't say no, is the thing. He said stop. And Newt's sat through the prerequisite PPDC-sanctioned workplace harassment seminars, he knows that no means no and that stop means stop or someone (Pentecost) will probably rip your balls off at a later date. But he knows Hermann, too, and he knows that stop really means "Don't fuck with me."

It's understandable. Hermann's freshly divorced, his wife left him for some dickhead with a yacht, yadda, yadda. Newt supposes he's feeling vulnerable or whatever. Delicate. Which is the last word Newt ever wants to associate with Hermann, he of the staidfast clenched jaw and the never-ending verbal barbs. But if the wingtip shoe fits.

Hermann just needs to be reminded of his own solidity. And also his obviously burning desire to mack on Newt. It's just Newt has never been one for coddling, and Hermann certainly wouldn't (couldn't) take that lying down. Newt needs to brainstorm. He needs options.

 

 

 

"I don't know, man. Colored chalk? That fucking fractal broccoli? Maybe you could punch yourself in the face in front of him. Over dinner."

Newt slaps Tendo's shoulder a little harder than necessary, probably. His palm stings. "Fuck off. I'm being serious, dude."

"So am I." Tendo bites off a huge chunk of poppyseed bagel and chews, mumbling around it, spraying crumbs. Newt speaks fluent foot-in-mouth and has a stomach made of steel, but he still squirms around in his rickety control room chair. "I'm not actually sure if Gottlieb is even capable of sexual arousal, man. He might be a robot. For real. Akiko from Engineering swore up and down that she saw him plug himself into a wall to recharge, once."

Newt screams a little and presses both hands into his eye sockets, hard. Tendo doesn't flinch, but he does raise a pointed eyebrow. "Calm down. You're gonna scare the interns."

In point of fact, it's 11:24 pm and the rest of LOCCENT, save the skeleton crew that monitor things overnight, has already gone to bunk. Also, the PPDC has no interns, because no one is willing to deal with all this end of the world bullshit without yearly bonuses and paid time off. Newt takes a very obvious look around the room, but Tendo remains unapologetic. 

"My best advice is to apologize, and then wait it out. Or grovel. You guys have to work together, right? He can't avoid you forever."

 

 

 

Turns out, Hermann probably _can_ avoid him forever, and might very well be attempting to do so.

By day three, Newt's basically given up on living. He wakes up in the morning, takes his two little yellow pills from the bottle in his bedside drawer, and then does fuckshit nothing for eight hours. The lab is large and lonely, and even full blast Music in Twelve Parts won't fill up the silence. It's not the same without Hermann's enraged sputtering. He eats dinner in the mess with Sarge and Nita, and then slumps back to his room and caps off his delightful day of waste with a round of angry masturbation.

Newt loves his job, he really does. But the summer months in Hong Kong really blow. It's too hot to pull his specimens from refrigeration for longer than an hour or so at a time, and it's so stupidly muggy that all his paperwork sticks together. His hair looks unspeakably awful.

All he wants in the world is to sprawl naked in bed with his cheap, plasticky fan propped on his bedside table. He wants to take cold showers and raid the mess kitchen's supply of vanilla ice cream, and if he could do all of that with Hermann, or at least without this shitty cloud of guilt hanging over his head, he would be deliriously happy. Probably. Besides the looming threat of a worldwide apocalypse, anyway.

Day four he spends entirely in the mess hall, doing sheaves of paperwork. If anyone asks, he says the lab is too hot, which is true. Tendo eyes him knowingly over lunch. "So are you hoping Gottlieb'll show, or are you really just that excited for Meatloaf Monday?"

Over the past few hours, Newt has folded lots of his more ridiculous inter-departmental memos into little paper airplanes. He has a pile of them within reach just for such an eventuality. He picks one up between thumb and forefinger (one wing has the words "-RE SEA MONKEYS IN COMMU -" typed on it in red ink, wow, someone needs a sense of humor) and shoots it straight at Tendo. It hits him high on the left temple, nose crumpling on impact, and then flutters sadly to the table.

"He has to eat sometime," Newt hisses, scowling.

Tendo takes a sip from his juice box. "Does he? Does he really?"

Newt pelts Tendo with paper airplanes until he strolls away, leaving half a tray full of ham sandwich and limp iceberg lettuce salad, laughing like a total asshole.

 

 

 

Hermann apparently really doesn't have to eat, or else he's decided he'd rather starve than attend Meatloaf Monday (or run into Newt). Newt suffers through dinner, and the pained groans of his fellow employees (except for that one guy in HR who is always ecstatic and eats like an entire loaf to himself, it's totally revolting), sits there drinking cup after cup of tarry coffee until suddenly it's two in the morning and he has to admit defeat.

He gathers all of his airplanes into a heap and pushes them along the table, into the trash. A granola bar stuffed into his front shirt pocket and a spare cup of coffee for the road, and Newt is on his way. To his room, at first, except he gets an inkling and veers to the left when he should be going right. Down a long and ill-lit hallway, and he's in front of the lab doors.

Newt is a goddamn genius. The door is cracked open and he hears the clack-clack-swoosh-clack of Hermann at work, the numerical muttering. "Two, two, two, three, carry the 9... ugh. Impossible. Bloody impossible."

He pushes the left door open a crack, because the right one always squeaks, and peers inside. Hermann's back is turned and he's actually at ground level for once, contemplating a dusted clean chalkboard, tap-tapping the chalk in his right hand over and over against the aluminum catch-all ledge. Looks like stress math.

The thing about Hermann is that he uses math in all sorts of ways that no sane human being would ever think of. And sure, Hermann might argue that numbers are the code that makes up every iota of matter in the world around them, but it's still a shitty coping mechanism, in Newt's opinion. When Hermann can't yell, he turns to his numbers. When he gets upset, numbers. Numbers for breakfast, numbers for lunch, numbers to forget that anyone had ever even looked at him funny or laughed at his awkward gait.

Newt has always felt vaguely proud that when it comes to him, Hermann has never once turned away, never once relied on a string of equations to blur Newt's transgressions from his memory. Probably Newt is too loud for even the numbers filling up Hermann's head to drown him out. Or maybe Hermann just enjoys shouting too much to let the opportunities go.

"So it's been brought to my attention, again, that I may have come on a little strong. And that might be why you're avoiding me."

Hermann jumps like three feet in the air and spins on one shoe so fast that his body doesn't have time to adjust, and he ends up bent over in an awkward sort of plié, hand thrown out for balance. Newt laughs at him and takes a step forward to help him up, but the venom in Hermann's eyes stops him short.

"Get out."

"Um," Newt says, looking around the lab with something like surprise. "Unless you've forgotten, we kinda share this space. His and his sides?"

"Then get to your side of the damn lab, and leave me in peace." Hermann has a nasty little twist to his mouth, and he looks about one wrong move away from whacking Newt with his cane again.

"I'm trying to apologize to you!" Newt is awful at apologizing, he knows this. But it doesn't hurt to try.

Hermann takes a deep breath, his entire body sagging on the exhale. "Whatever for? The way you blatantly disregarded my request that you display some iota of respect for me, in my own workspace? The way you mocked me in front of god only _knows_ who, in the cafeteria the other night? Your constant attempts to - to rile me up?"   
Newt nods, relieved. "Yeah! All of that. And I'm sorry I called you a pussy. That was totally rude."

Hermann opens his mouth, probably to start yelling. Which is great and all, it's nice to see the old Hermann for once, ready to rip out Newt's throat without the slightest hint of remorse, it really is. But this is totally not the time for that. Newt holds up a hand to stop him. "Except I totally wasn't joking about wanting to take you out on a date. Or just have sex, whatever, I get you're probably not ready for a relationship so soon after, y'know. That whole thing."

"That whole thing." Hermann says, flatly.

"Yeah, you know, with you and Vanessa and that dumb jock guy with the Swiss bank account?"

"Newton," Hermann says, and he looks so exhausted, slipping his piece of chalk back into its designated box with all the other nubs. "Stop."

"Dude, no! I'm not making fun of you, I swear. And I know you're not exactly opposed to the whole thing, I've seen you looking at me." A terrible thought occurs to Newt. "Unless, um, unless what I thought was like, repressed lust was just you, like, hating my guts via covert glances. Was it?"

Hermann still looks grim and tired, but now he looks a little shifty, too. A little defeated. Ha! Fucking right.

"Oh my god, I'm so right. Can I kiss you now?"

Newt doesn't wait for an answer, just steps forward (with a brief pause to put down his coffee and fish the granola bar out of his pocket, because nothing is more of a boner killer than spilling hot liquids down the front of your intended's shirt). Hermann has squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for impact, both hands curled tightly on the rungs of his ladder. His mouth is soft, for once, and slightly open - Newt figures that's as good of an invitation as he's ever going to get.

Hermann doesn't kiss at all like Newt was expecting. He thought maybe it would be a little like their best arguments, a violent back-and-forth, Hermann pushing, Newt pushing back. Instead he finds that Hermann is silent and still against him, barely responsive, mouth slack and pliant. He hums and licks Hermann's lower lip, bites down when Hermann gasps.

"Don't." Hermann says, into the space between their lips. When Newt pulls back enough to get a look at his face, Hermann is full-on grimacing,  
but his eyes are trained on Newt's mouth, and his eyes are huge and dark and full of want.

"Why?" Hermann shakes his head and doesn't appear to have an answer for that. Or at least not one that he wants to explain to Newt. All right, then.

Newt kisses him again, and again, and then again, until he's breathless, until his dick is full and hard against the seam of his jeans. His entire body feels electric, thrumming with satisfaction every time Hermann breaks away to take a desperate breath, with every minute shift of Newt's body that brings them closer together.

Hermann stays stock-still against the ladder, barely breathing. He parts his lips as needed, takes Newt's tongue against his own, lets Newt palm the side of his face and the curve of his ass. It's annoying as shit. Newt reaches up a hand and pinches Hermann's side viciously though his cotton shirt.

Hermann _yells_ , equal parts pain and shock, and squirms away from Newt, pressing himself fully along the ladder. "What the _fu_ \- Newton!"

Newt laughs and reaches out to pinch his other side, letting Hermann slap his hand away well before it reaches his goal. "You're seriously just gonna lie there and think of Germany? Like you don't want this? Come on, man. Pretty much the only person you're fooling is yourself."

Hermann's eyes narrow and he grabs Newt's upper arm, reels him in. Kisses him back, finally. It's good, it's great, it's so much better than before. Hermann is licking into Newt's mouth, not at all carefully, their teeth clacking together, Newt's chin slick with spit. His short nails are biting into Newt's skin through his shirt and he's making rough, low sounds in the back of his throat, barely audible. Newt has never cared much for finesse. The messiness of it is getting him off almost as much as the fact that Hermann's even here at all.

"Do you -" Newt says into Hermann's mouth, running a hand down Hermann's chest to press his thumb into the hollow of a hip. "Do you want to, like. Can we?"

Hermann nods, slowly. Almost reluctantly. Bullshit.

Newt breaks away with a gasp, and starts to fumble with his own clothing. Nudity! Nudity is always the answer in these situations. There are so many more places on Hermann's body that Newt wants to kiss.

"What are you doing?" Hermann's lips are pinched together, his eyes narrowed to little slits. Not the most ideal expression, considering.

"Um," Newt says, looking down at his own hands, curled around the hem of his shirt, ready to pull it off. "Taking off my shirt? Obviously?"

Hermann shifts against Newt, shoulders smearing the chalk on the board against his back, huffing. "That won't be necessary. I believe we will manage just fine if you could just _keep your damn clothes on._ "

A few responses to that filter through Newt's mind: But the door is closed, dude. Who the hell has sex with their clothes on? When you told me to put my shirt back on, did you mean _forever_? I would really like to suck your dick at some point in the next five minutes or so, does this mean it's a no to that?

He doesn't say any of them because this, this was already so far beyond anything he'd ever thought to get away with. Hermann's long fingers are tangled in Newt's hair, his cheeks flushed pink, hips shifting against Newt's belly in little unconscious twitches.

Newt presses his thumb to the corner of Hermann's mouth and watches as his lips part on a shaky breath. "Fuck it," he says, and lifts up on his toes to press his lips to Hermann's, fingers digging into the hinge of his jaw, forcing the kiss wider, messier.

Hermann's nails bite into Newt's scalp and he makes a sweet, breathy sound that has Newt crowding even closer, rubbing himself against Hermann's thigh. Hermann pulls away with a gasp, shaking his head. "Oh my god, no, come back," Newt mumbles, and catches his sides, forcibly stilling him.

Hermann's entire body freezes, but Newt twists a little, bringing one hand around to press at the small of Hermann's back, shoving himself impossibly closer. He glances down. That is definitely Hermann's dick pressing against Newt, tenting the fabric of his ugly fucking slacks. Newt makes a really super embarrassing noise at the sight of it, can't help it, and wraps his arms entirely around Hermann, pulling him against himself in a rough collision that makes his own breath stutter.

Newt noses Hermann's collar as far down as it'll go, buttoned to the top like that, and rubs his own stubbled cheek against the softness of Hermann's neck. He bites down, worrying the skin beneath Hermann's ear and scrambling to get closer, get all over him, because all of the heat pressed up against him is driving Newt nuts.

He feels crazy with it, and dumb, because they've barely done anything at all yet and Newt is pretty much ready to come in his own pants like a goddamn teenager. Hermann is making these pained little noises high in his throat, head tilted back against the chalkboard. His eyes are squeezed shut when Newt pulls back to get a look at him, mouth caught in a grimace. He has a dusting of white along the hair at his temples and the crown of his head, a puff of chalk dust on his right cheekbone.

"You look so good, you know that?" Hermann cracks open one eye, incredulous and clearly gearing up for some snotty remark or another. "You do, you really, really do. Can I blow you?"

Hermann goes tense again. Sometimes Newt's mouth says things without any input whatsoever from his brain. It's gotten his ass kicked more than once. It fucking figures that the first time he has Hermann exactly where he wants him - pressed up against Newt, dick twitching in his pants, mouth bitten red and shiny withs pit - he brings up the one thing that really seems to freak Hermann right out. _Repeatedly_.

"N-Newton, if you find yourself unable to cede to the one request that I have made of you, then I believe that perhaps we--"

"Okay, no, don't do that," Newt says, and snakes his hand back to grasp Hermann's dick right through his trousers, hoping it will distract him long enough to diffuse the weird-ass tension. Hermann groans and his dick twitches in Newt's hand, though his face is still halfway to a scowl.

Newt presses sloppy kisses against any bit of skin he can reach - throat, jaw, earlobe, Hermann's tightly-drawn upper lip. He slides his hand up and down, fingers curled around the hard line of Hermann's dick, slowing on the upstroke to find that spot right beneath the head and rubbing his thumb against it in slow circles. Hermann whines and shoves Newt's face away with a palm to his mouth, muttering curses. "For god's sake, stop that. You're going to rub me raw."

"Can you even grow a beard? Are you jealous?" Newt laughs. Hermann refuses to answer, pinching Newt's side so hard that Newt yelps and squirms away and then back again, shaking his head. "Not fair, man!"

He licks a line up Hermann's stubble-burned throat, giggling, while Hermann bats at his face and makes hilarious little noises.

"No, really, it's fine. We can keep our clothes on, we can do whatever you wanna do, it's fine. It's just I kind of have this fantasy? Well, I have a lot of them, honestly, but most of them you really have to be naked for. My favorite is this one where you, like, take off my pants and bend me over my bed or your desk or anything, really. And you put your fingers in me -"

"Oh, god," Hermann says, face going suddenly slack. He looks completely lost, eyes flickering over Newt's face with something like wonder. "Oh my god. You're serious."

Newt nods solemnly. "So serious. Can I - is this weird?"

Hermann knows Newt, knows what he's asking, and shakes his head slowly, eyes wide and dark with wonder. "No, I. Would like to hear."

Newt kisses him again, hard. He pulls back just far enough to look Hermann straight in the eye, which is just about the most awkward thing you can do when you're saying all sorts of dirty stuff to the guy you're getting off with for the very first time, but that's just the kind of guy Newt is.

"So you finger me, right? And I want, Hermann, I want you to put as many in me as I can take. Really slowly, one at a time. I think if you go slow I could take your whole hand, even, I'd be so good for you. I, fuck. I want it so bad."

There's a shameful sort of whine in his voice by the end of the sentence. His thighs feel shaky and tight all at once with the urge to just rut himself against Hermann until they both come. He rubs his palm against the base of Hermann's dick instead, until Hermann is swearing and saying, "Oh, oh, oh, I -"

"I don't think I'd even need you to touch me, I mean, I think I could come just from that, from your fingers in me. I have before. I did it, I fucked myself and pretended it was you. It was so fucking good, shit, I can't even imagine how good it would be with you actually there."

Hermann's hand shoots out, seizing Newt's wrist. Newt has a brief moment of sheer panic, that maybe he's finally gone to far, that Hermann is going to make him stop. Instead Hermann tightens his grip and uses his leverage to push Newt's hand higher and tighter against his own dick. Newt redoubles his efforts, pressing upwards to bite at Hermann's bottom lip.

"I think about you fucking me all the time," he says, conversationally. If all of his concentration wasn't currently focused on making Hermann come in his pants like a teenager, he might have high-fived himself. "I really do, Hermann."

Hermann is going tense again, but in the good way, the shivery, falling-apart way. He can't look Newt in the eye anymore, but Newt can't stop staring, taking him in. His shoulders are shaking against the chalkboard now, throat working around more of those stupid little sounds. Newt needs to keep Hermann distracted, needs to make him want it again, again and again and again until Hermann lets him strip off all of their clothes and fuck himself on Hermann's dick. Never let it be said that Newt doesn't have goals.

"I think about sitting on your lap and riding you until - until I come on you, until I come all over your cock."

Hermann gasps and stiffens, holding Newt's hand in place as he rubs his dick in slow, tight circles against it. His brow is furrowed, mouth open and wet, eyes tightly shut. He comes in long, lazy pulses, soaking his slacks and Newt's hand right along with them.

"Holy shit," Newt says, trembling. He waits until Hermann is limp and blinking open glassy eyes before pressing himself in close again. He parts his thighs around Hermann's good leg, letting out a huff of breath at the feel of it, Hermann's come soaking through his own pants and his whole body buzzing like a livewire, need-want-take. He rests his head against Hermann's shoulder, moaning, fucking himself against Hermann over and over until he's almost choking with the need to come. "Hermann, please."

Hermann slowly lifts one hand and cradles the back of Newt's neck. His whole body is limp, propped between Newt and the chalkboard, the fucking perfect surface for Newt to rub himself off on. Not like it really mattered, though. Newt is so close he could practically taste it, body wound up fit to explode, arms so tight around Hermann's back that it must be painful.

Hermann tips his head forward against Newt's ear and says, "Please what, Newton? Tell me."

"Please let me, say you will, say you'll fuck me, please."

"I suppose that would be acceptable." It's a mark of exactly how far gone Newt is that he completely whites out at that, coming with a long, high-pitched moan that he can't even find it in himself to be embarrassed about.

Afterwards, head tucked beneath Hermann's chin while Hermann squawks and tries to push him off, Newt laughs. "I am totally holding you to that, man. Oh my god. Awesome."


End file.
